Silicon Valley wants us to believe that their autonomous products are a kind of self-guided magic, but the technology is clearly not there yet. A quick peak behind the curtain has consistently revealed a product base that, at a minimum, is still deeply reliant on human workforces.
This sounds exactly like Amazon’s “Just walk out” grocery store concept that actually required remote supervising by workers in India.
We DO NOT want Indians remote driving cars in America holy shit.
But they are self-driving. DON’T YOU DARE not appreciate that!
/s
Meep meep
Amazon stopped being able to deliver working products in 2016
I’m starting to get a bit annoyed by takes like this.
Of course people had to check the automated system. that’s how they are debugged and trained.
The newsworthy part is just that they missed their target goal of reviewed sales. In the end of the trial they still needed 70% review rate instead of their goal of 5%.
The system was still fully automated. But some needed checks after the sales happened. That’s what trials are there for
Or you could, you know, pay a person a living wage to be physically present at the store to assist shoppers and review the sales.
Or, hear me out. Maybe a 70% review requirement is not automation at all. Just saying.
You could, yes. And that should be the criticism.
If you attack them on bullshit terms, you do exactly what they want and they can go “well, those idiots don’t even know what they are talking about”.
Maybe a 70% review requirement is not automation at all
And amazon agrees. which is why they closed the experiment down
70% instead of 5% is so far away that it’s pretty clear their system isn’t working. I would understand your criticism if we were talking about 10% vs. 5% but not with these numbers it’s clear this system never worked, even in a testing environment
While you aren’t wrong that every automated system needs human oversight and occasional intervention, when the average person hears “fully automated” or any of the many marketing terms used for these things lately they are going to take it pretty close to face value.
It also doesn’t help that it was largely marketed and reported on as if it wasn’t an experiment, but a solved and working “product”.
Every system will have its own requirements and acceptable margins for error and required interventions, but I think most people would feel that even the one in twenty (5%) goal is a lot for a project like the Amazon automated shops. It would be a lot for any of the automations I come into contact with (and have built) at my job, but admittedly I’m not doing anything as remotely novel or as complicated as an unattended shop.
Beyond that, people have a lot more reasons to dislike these systems than just the amount of human intervention and I think they’re just going to jump on whichever one is currently being discussed in order to express it. Like displeasure that the teleoperation positions are outsourced the way they are, taking even more jobs away from the local population.
Mechanical Turks are my favorite trope of the 2020s.
The job post also notes that such a teleoperation center requires “building highly optimized low latency reliable data streaming over unreliable transports in the real world.” Tele-operators can be “transported” into the robotaxi via a “state-of-the-art VR rig,” it adds.
Oh man that’s pretty hilarious for “autonomous vehicles”
Tesla would not be the first robotaxi company to use this method. In fact, it’s an industry standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi company owned by General Motors, was employing remote human assistants to troubleshoot when its vehicles ran into trouble
Oh, so this is actually completely normal and should not be news worthy…
Remote human intervention when automated systems fail should be expected and required to be honest with current technology. There are simply too many edge cases in the real world, even with the trillions of miles Tesla has trained their system on.
When will the intervention be called upon? How we react is defined by the context we have. Imagine being dropped into a pre accident situation without any context.
No idea, and I doubt they’ll ever publicly say.
Direct human intervention is definitely something other companies could be doing more of. Waymo especially given all the videos of them getting stuck, sometimes en masse.
I had heard through a friend who works at Waymo they currently have 1.5 engineers per car. Ideally, if you want a self-driving car company to be financially successful, that number should be significantly less than 1. These companies are heavily propped up by VC money and it’s not at all clear they’ll achieve that goal.
I find that 1.5 number amazingly hard to believe unless those engineers are never actually watching the vehicles while in use, in which case the number means absolutely nothing. The number of engineers per vehicle on staff means absolutely nothing if they aren’t the ones monitoring them for issues while in use. You might as well say you have 50 employees per vehicle, including all office workers, executives, janitorial staff, etc. because it means nothing.
Given videos like this where there are dozens of them in complete chaos. Human intervention would easily clear that in a couple minutes, instead they just kept stacking up.
Waymo, uniquely, never remotely drives their vehicles. You’d have to wait for a safety driver to show up in order to help the vehicle
Other companies do remotely drive
Remote human intervention when automated systems fail should be expected and required to be honest with current technology.
The “human in the loop” is one of those things that sounds good but isn’t at all in reality.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/
A human was literally sitting at the wheel as Uber’s taxi ran someone over.
Driving is nothing but edge cases, and that’s why maybe paying drivers to drive people around is better than some half-baked AI driving people under trucks and hoping a call center employee is paying enough attention to bail them out.
It’s normal in the industry but the industry likes to tell the public otherwise so from time to time these articles pop up.
Amazon’s just walk out shop, with AI looking with cameras what you bought, was actually run by indians remotely because the automation didn’t quite work. Food delivery robots are run by people in low cost areas. Over guy runs multiple robots with a pont-and-click interface. That kind of thing. I’m sure autonomy is worked on but it’s not fully autonomous yet.
Two notes on this as someone who works in the sector.
It’s “completely normal”, but only if you’re not having a full time driver for each vehicle, which is what the article sounds like… Then the vehicles wouldn’t be autonomous, they’d just be teleoperated.
And the second part, why is this an industry standard and why are investors ok with it? Imagine you have a product (robotaxi) that is autonomous but can’t deal with absolutely everything on its own (not even Waymo is that advanced). The key component that you need to build into the system is the ability to come to a stop safely, and be recovered remotely. Then these “teleoperators” can recover the vehicles if/when they fail, and given a sufficiently low failure rate, you can have one operator for each X vehicles. Even if this is more than “0 drivers”, having 1 driver per 10 vehicles is a massive cost saving. Plus zooming out and thinking of other things than robotaxis, there are sectors like mining where they don’t care (that much) about the number of drivers - their primary goal is to have the drivers away from a dangerous mine. They can save money from simplifying operations that way.
Musk is a little whiney bitch that can’t hold his word. Full autonomous my ass. His words are all lies.
To be fair it is probably not on purpose. He is just too stupid to make realistic estimates of what will be possible.
We have this requirement called truth in advertising, but it doesn’t seem to apply to billionaires.
It is on purpose. It started with his first POS company, Zip2, when he built a fake chassis to make their server look bigger and more powerful to investors.
I guess, he is just busy selling…
Remotely-driven robotaxis seem like the worst option available. I’m imagining a whole cubicle farm LARPing GTA5.
This always the solution to these big, over promised AI projects… “what if i just pay someone a pittance to do the hard part.”
Fake it till you make enough investor money to hire remote humans
What if your robot was just a guy?
Space Karen is a fraud
Preferred prior experience: Midtown Madness (100+ hours), GTA (100+ hours), or comparative driving simulators.
Hey hey hey, it’s time to make crrrazy money! Are you ready?
Bit-co-NECCCCCCCCCCCCT
They want remote taxis, not Blechschaden.
Best I can do is Burnout: Revenge
Oh look, Crazy Taxi in real life!
It’s just like the indoor farm factory things, eventually everyone realises it’s too expensive
Cost of car + remote driver infrastructure + remote driver (minimum) wage will be much higher than simpler car + local driver
Now we just have to wait for some startup to pitch “local drivers” as a revolutionary new idea.
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You missed the part about AI - Actual Intelligence
To take a job at Tesla is to be ok with getting shitcanned at any time for any reason
So most like any job these days
I guess it’s not for live driving? The ping of any connection can’t be good enough for that?
Who cares about ping when there are profits to be made
5G is a requirement for self driving cars. Usually the remote driver does low speed interventions to get the car out of a situation, then switches the automation back on.
“Whoops you hit a dead zone — missed stopping at the red light and killed the passenger, would you like to reload and try again?”
I guess it’s not for live driving?
Oh yes, it is. They mean business.
The ping of any connection can’t be good enough for that?
The internet infrastructure of any really existing city is not good enough if just a few thousand cars “suddenly” become unable to self-drive, and therefore need these thousands of remote guys with their VR glasses.
Or, maybe there will be only 50 of these VR guys anyway, and so it takes, let’s say, 20 hours to move 1000 cars, or 60 hours to move 3000 cars…
BTW How much food and water do you carry in your car, usually?
